Before Egypt - 2020

I can’t remember when I first thought about going to Egypt. What I remember is the answer. No. You won’t like what it looks like now. I had never been. I had no plans to go. I didn’t write the words down. I didn’t need to, they were the kind that stay on their own.

Years later I walked past my son Joshua playing a video game. It was set in ancient Egypt, and the Egypt on his screen was green - rivers, reeds, fields running down to the water. He looked up and asked if we could go. I stopped and looked at the screen for a moment. Yes, I said. I think it’s time. But it won’t look like that.

We planned it for the Easter holidays of 2020, when the whole family could travel together. Then, in December 2019, in the spa one evening, I heard it again. Not Easter. Next month. January.

We have a large saltwater spa in the garden, and we sit in it most evenings. By now it is almost a ritual. I didn’t get out. I turned to Sean and told him we needed to go to Egypt next month. He said okay. I turned back to my iPad and started looking at flights.

That was when the second nudge came. Book it through Emin, the man at Flight Centre who had arranged our last trip. Sean had already said we could organise it ourselves, and we could have. I went to Emin.

In March the world shut. By then we had been home for weeks.

Emin took the few plans I had and turned them around. We would land in Jordan - Petra, the Dead Sea - and come into Egypt from there. And the route through Egypt could only run one way: the opposite of the one I had intended. There were two rooms left. I have always been adaptable. I took them.

We landed in Amman on the sixth of January. I woke the first morning and looked out at the sunrise. It was blood red. Activation, I wrote. The sky that morning was not quiet. I didn’t have the chart in front of me yet. I only had the red light on the window and the word that came with it.

Our guide, Muhammed, drove us out to Jerash. It rose out of the ground in colonnades, a whole Roman city still standing in the hills. I walked under the Arch of Hadrian and a feeling came over me that I had walked under it before — not the thin flicker of ordinary déjà vu but something with weight to it, the body recognising a place the mind had never seen.

The path up to the Temple of Artemis climbed in a single flight of steps. Muhammed told us the number mattered. There were forty-nine. Seven sevens, and in the old world seven was the sacred number, the seven visible planets, the music of the spheres, and seven squared lifted it past the ordinary city below into the realm of the temple. The stairs were not built to get you to the top. They were built so that the climb itself changed you on the way up. By the time you reached the altar you were meant to be someone slightly different from the person who started.

I didn’t know yet that the whole trip was going to be built that way. Stairs that were not only stairs. A route I hadn’t chosen, running the direction I hadn’t planned. I was already climbing, and I had only just arrived.

We drove south toward Petra and stopped on the way at Mount Nebo, the mountain where Moses was shown the Promised Land he would not live to enter. I stood where he had stood and looked the way he had looked. It was hazy, a thin drizzle had been falling all morning, and the far land went soft at the edges. I hope he had a clear day.

There is a memorial church to him at the summit, and we lined up single file to go in. A cat sat on a pedestal just inside the door, watching the queue pass. One by one, people reached out to pat her; one by one, she hissed them off. I put my hand out when it was my turn.

She let me. I am a cat person.

We came into Petra in the evening. In Amman the sky had been blue and the air almost warm; here there was snow, and cold, and the sense of something braced against us. We had arrived at the time of a lunar eclipse.

Petra is not a ruin you look at. It is a place you walk into, deeper and deeper, until the walls close over you. And to reach the Monastery you climb - eight hundred and fifty steps, cut into the rock by hands thousands of years ago, uneven, worn, no two the same height. I had been climbing stairs since Jerash. These were the ones my body could not do.

My hip had first spoken just over a year before, in December 2018, a sharp refusal in a yoga class, no warning, no cause I could name. I didn’t yet know what it was. I didn’t yet know it would take seven years to answer. All I knew on that descent was that somewhere in the climb it had stopped negotiating with me.

By the time the others went on to the final lookout, I had to let them. I stood where I was and took the view from there, and told myself the problem was getting up. It wasn’t. The problem was getting down.

When we started the descent the pain was past anything I could climb through, and a small panic came with it, eight hundred and fifty steps below me and no way down them that didn’t hurt. There were donkeys for hire on the path. I wanted one. But my daughter had been distressed all trip by how the animals were treated, and I wasn’t going to add to it. So we went down on foot, my husband holding my hand the whole way, one step at a time.

Partway down a girl stepped into my path. Twelve, maybe fourteen. The whole trip had been thick with vendors, insistent, used to tourists, but this was not that. She planted herself in front of me and demanded money, and something in it frightened me. The note I wrote in my diary that night was a question. Was that young girl possessed?

We reached the bottom. They drove us back to the hotel. The others went out that evening. I couldn’t.

I lay down on the bed in the hotel room and I was afraid. Not of the pain itself, but of what was coming. In a few days we were due at the Great Pyramid, and I had read that the climb into the King’s Chamber was steep and low and hard on the legs, the kind of climb I had just proven I could not make. I had come all this way, moved the whole trip to January on the strength of a voice in the water, and now my own body was the thing standing between me and the room I had crossed the world to enter.

So I did the only thing I knew to do. I prayed, and I gave myself Reiki - hands on the hip, in the dark, while the others were out, asking for nothing more complicated than to be able to walk.

I woke the next morning and the pain was gone.

Not eased. Gone. I got up and moved through the room and waited for it to catch me, the way pain does, and it didn’t. The hip that had refused eight hundred and fifty steps the day before carried me out to the car without comment. I didn’t question it too hard. I had learned by then that when the body is given what it needs, in the right moment, it can hold its own ground, and that the help arrives more readily than we expect, if we are willing to lie down in the dark and ask.

The road from Petra to the Dead Sea runs down through Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, all red sand and standing rock, the place the films reach for when they need somewhere that looks like nowhere on this earth. We stopped at Kerak on the way, a Crusader fortress built down into the hillside in seven tiers, its vaulted halls and underground passages cold and close. There is an eeriness to walking a maze that was built for siege.

Then the long drop. Kerak sits about a thousand metres above the sea. The Dead Sea lies more than four hundred below it. We descended the whole way as the light went, arriving at sunset to a sky doing something I had no name for at first, a great spread of cloud with shafts of light falling out of it in rays, reaching down toward the land. I looked it up. A hand of God, the formation is called, a term I had come across before the trip and now recognised above me. I noted it and thought no more about it.

Our room was 1403. The numbers summed to eight. Set into the ceiling of the bedroom was the shape of an octagon - the eight-sided figure that the old builders used for the place where one world passes into another, the step between the square of the earth and the circle of the heavens.

This is a place of regeneration, and we treated it as one. We went down to the shore and were rubbed head to foot with salt, then covered in the dark mineral mud, and walked out into water so dense it would not let us sink. You do not swim in the Dead Sea. You are held by it. We did it morning and night.

On the second afternoon I went to have my hair done at the far end of the resort, and did not know that the sun there sets close to five at that time of year. By the time I started back it was dark. The resort was vast. I lost the path. I went looking for someone - a guest, a staff member, anyone - and there was no one, anywhere, for what felt like a very long time. Just me, and the dark, and the turning paths that would not resolve into the way home.

I found it eventually. And I laughed at myself, because I knew the shape of what I was being walked through. Moses wandered forty years. Jesus went into the desert forty days. I had been lost in a resort for about forty minutes - a very modern initiation, scaled to fit a woman with freshly done hair who only wanted to find her room.

I had come into Jordan and been put through it. The stairs at Jerash that were built to change you on the way up. The hip that refused Petra and was returned to me overnight when I lay down and asked. The descent to the lowest place on earth, and the salt, and the dark walk that ended at a door I could not at first find.

It had started in salt, in the spa at home, on an evening in December when a voice said next month. It ended in salt, floating in the oldest water on earth, held up by it.

I did not know yet that this had all been the approach. That Jordan was where the body was made ready, and Egypt was where it would be received.

We flew to Cairo on the thirteenth of January. A woman was waiting for us at the airport, and the first thing she said, looking straight at me, was: all pharaohs follow the female line. Welcome to Cairo.

The next piece is about what happened when Egypt opened its doors — and asked nothing of me at all.

The patterns I write about here can be read in your own chart too. If you’d like to explore your soul map, I offer galactic astrology readings at divinehealingx.com — including an Asteroid Deep Dive into the soul-level threads traditional astrology often misses.

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